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In just about any Role-Playing Game that has a level system, players will try to make the game easier for themselves via Level Grinding. Most games only gently discourage this, by simply making each level take longer to reach than the one before it, unless you're actually going through the game at the intended pace - in which case the requirements for gaining a level end up keeping pace with what you can get toward a level-up from the current enemies.

Sometimes, however, the developers decide that they really don't want you to level grind like that, so they'll put in more measures to prevent it. They may simply make it so hard to get your level higher than the one they want you at that even a dedicated level grinder would give up in disgust or resort to a cheat device, or they might make it actually impossible to level past a certain point before you get to the next part of the plot. This is Anti Grinding.

The most common forms of this are escalating "experience to next level" values, where the higher your level goes, the more excessive the amount of experience you need to level up, and adjusted experience gains, where the amount of experience you earn for defeating an enemy is relative to your current level — a level 50 party killing level 4 enemies would get a whopping 1 experience point for their trouble. Another option is to make enemies gain levels along with the player, so grinding an extra ten levels leaves you with enemies ten levels tougher, too. If the enemy also learns new attacks and powers as they level up, this could backfire on the player, making those Giant Spiders extra demonic. A few games (but not MMORPG ones) add a time limit to discourage excessive grinding so a player must go to next area / complete objectives within a certain amount of time.

Compare Anti-Hoarding, measures similarly designed to prevent the players from indefinitely hoarding up items they obtain. See also Absurdly Low Level Cap, which is when a game makes it possible to reach the level cap without excessive grinding, and Experience Penalty.

Examples:

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Action Adventure

Zigzagged in the first In FAMOUS. The game prevents you from grinding your Karma Meter until certain points in the story. It still serves the same function as other forms of Anti-Grinding, since you can't get the best upgrades for your powers until the game wants you to. You can still grind for experience points to spend on the powers you'll eventually unlock, though.

The second game, however, averts this trope. You can grind your Karma Meter as high as you want to as soon as you finish the intro missions.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night very quickly reduces weaker enemies to giving a mere one experience due to its experience system. The game compares your level to that of your enemies, then sharply reduces your EXP for every level you are above them. However, when they outlevel you, you only get a marginal gain in EXP. Thankfully, it's not necessary to grind in most cases.

Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia actually downplays this a lot by making bosses and enemies still deal incredible amounts of damage despite having high levels. Those thinking they could still grind their way to defeating tougher enemies will be in for a surprise.

In Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, once the character gains a level, monsters lower than that level no longer give experience points, thus forcing the player to move on to harder areas to continue leveling.

killer7, while not an RPG, does have a level grinding mechanic: killing enemies earns you thick blood, which can be turned into serum at save points and used to upgrade your characters. However, you can only carry 1000 units of thick blood at once, it doesn't carry over through levels, and if you convert enough the serum conversion machine stops working until the next level. The last level in which Blood is obtainable, Smile, Part 2, on the other hand, seems to be an aversion, as the blood that can be converted is either much higher or unlimited, though the cost is that grinding is much harder due to enemies either giving little blood, being hard to get blood from, or, if you DO find an enemy that gives a lot of blood easily, they won't respawn.

Oceanhorn discourages grinding by having monster hunting not be a practical way of getting experience in the first place. The amount of experience needed to gain a level ranges from a couple hundred XP to just under 2,000, and there are exactly two kind of non-boss enemies that give more than 5 XP per kill. The primary source of experience in the game comes from achievements, which can only be done once each per playthrough (Though three achievements do involve grinding kills of a certain monster type). In addition to this, gaining levels never grants increases in health, defensive power, or offensive power, which removes the normal reasons why a player would want to grind for levels.

SoulBlazer specifically limits the number of enemies—when you kill them, the Mook Maker shuts down and they're gone. There are a couple of places where enemies spawn infinitely and Level Grinding can be done, but it's much harder than usual.

Illusion of Gaia, the sequel to SoulBlazer, has 100% finite enemies and a very unique leveling system that rewards you only when you clear a room. However, if you ignore the leveling and go straight to the boss, you get the level ups anyway, discouraging low level runners.

The third game in the series, Terranigma, just throws in the towel and gives in to grinding and infinite enemies.

If you kill enough animals in a given area in Tomb Raider (2013), it will become hunted out, at which point animals become rare and the experience and salvage awards for kill them drop to virtually nothing. Of course, there are so few areas with a large number of animals with high rewards for hunting them (Deer and boars) that most players will not bother to spend much time grinding in the first place.

The sequel Rise of the Tomb Raider took a different approach. There's no limit to the amount of game that can be hunted, but there are multiple types of salvage, which are only taken from certain opponents. Grinding for deer will only provide hides and antlers, which is useless if you need nuts and springs, which are found on humans. In addition, there's an upper limit to how much salvage Lara can carry in each category at any time, so the player will be obliged to actually use some of that stuff eventually.

There are a limited number of enemies, preventing you from grinding to get Red Orbs and in addition, after you kill enough number of respawning enemies, they will not spawn anymore Red Orbs. However, you can circumvent this once- the area where you get Medusa's Head has enemies that respawn unless you kill them by petrifying them and you have infinite magic until you accomplish this. While they quickly stop giving you Red Orbs from killing them, you can still get them for getting large combos, which is easily accomplished by endlessly spamming Poseidon's Rage on them.

There's also another way to get an unlimited amount of Red Orbs later in the game, but this relies more on a Good Bad Bug which involves killing a Harpy at a specific location so that it falls on specific piece of level geometry while dying, gets stuck in its dying animation and continues spewing out an endless stream of Red Orbs.

The third game has an odd way of doing this: an Absurdly Low Level Cap. The party will likely hit the max level of 30 near the end of the final main area (their skills will also be maxed out by then), so their stats won't go any higher. Thus, while you can grind freely in the early parts of the game, no amount of it will save you from the Pyrohydra and Akron. However, you can remove the cap on a New Game+.

The fourth game removes the low level cap, but instead makes its use limited in Battle Mountain; every enemy there scales to the party's level with proportional stat gains.

The Naughty Sorceress, the Final Boss of the main run in Kingdom of Loathing, drops an Instant Karma item when defeated, but only if you fight her at level 13, the lowest level the game will allow you to fight her at.

Legend Of Zork allows you to choose at which level you want to take a level at, but each level below you gives diminishing experience and currency. If you're playing at more than four levels below your own, you receive no experience whatsoever, and only a pittance of money. Which takes forever, but since you don't need to go anywhere to buy equipment and battles are determined by percentage values, it might be worth the month of grinding for 30 zorkmids.

Fighting Games

The sequel to Dissidia: Final Fantasy, Duodecim, subverts this. The Final Boss for the last required story mode hovers around level 50 while the player is capped at 100. Thus, it is very possible for players to just overpower things with superior levels. So, in an attempt at installing Anti-Grinding, the designers implemented something called a KP Bonus Line, which makes it hard for a high-leveled character to gain currency. However, the player can set their character's level to any they've already reached. While an adjusted-level character is still bound by equip level and basic stats, they have access to all the abilities of their true level, plus the CP to equip them, rendering the developers' attempts largely pointless

Played straight on the game's Battlegen, where Level ups are needed to obtain certain items.

First Person Shooter

Deus Ex: Human Revolution gives a tiny amount of XP for killing enemies, ten times that amount for the most basic of exploration rewards, and a hundred times for completing major sections of the storyline. You can grind, but your "grinding" is sidequests, exploring air vents and hacking random doors rather than killing enemies.

The game also encourages non-lethal kills, as it rewards more XP. The most you can get from an enemy is 50 (10 for defeating him, 20 for non-lethal, and 20 for using a takedown or headshot), which is 1% towards getting a Praxis kit.

The original Deus Ex gives no XP for enemies, and only rewards you with it when you are physically present in certain map locations or trigger certain events. Advancing the plot gives the biggest rewards, but finding secret areas not only gets you hidden equipment and ammo, but somehow improves how well you can swim and pick locks.

Far Cry 3 covertly does this. It's ostensibly done so as to make your power level and skill progression match where you are in the narrative, but what it actually does is infuriatingly limit player progression and artificially prolong the Early Game Hell. Essentially, it won't let you acquire more skills past a certain point without doing more story missions. This can be a real pain in the ass when it won't let you do things like upgrade your health or ability to do first aid without syringes until after you've gone through missions where those things would have been very useful.

PAYDAY 2 discourages players from abusing level grinding on high difficulty levels by deducting EXP points from your gains at the end of the heist if you try to play on a heist whose difficulty level is above your recommended level. The game also reduces EXP gained if you play the same heist over and over again, but will give you an EXP bonus if you start playing heists that you have not been playing for a while.

MMORPG

Many MMORPGs will not allow characters into an area if they are above a certain level, or if they are above that level, will level down the characters and force them to use equipment of the appropriate level.

Anarchy Online takes the same route as Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines - you only get experience for beating missions (though you do get items and such if you wish to beat up any enemies in a mission). However this resulted in a different sort of grinding due to the relatively simplistic nature of the randomly generated missions and the sorts of abilities one could get. Players would create characters that run very very fast and literally run through a mission (sometimes in as short a time as six seconds), grab the MacGuffin to complete the mission, and then repeated the process.

Battle Stations, on the other hand, determines NPC encounters based on your level and limits Pv P targets to those within 5 levels of the player. Even in Clan War, the player will only encounter attacking or defending players within their level range. Thus, unless you're trying to meet requirements for a particular piece of equipment, grinding is pointless.

City of Heroes uses this trope by having all enemies 5 levels lower than you stop producing experience and influence, and also disallows you to accept missions in low level areas after a certain point. They also prevent Level Grinding in the same manner.

In an odd player-enforced example, they added the Newspaper/Police Scanner to give infinite random missions because players in the upper levels were running out of missions from their contacts and having to resort to level grinding to get new missions again. The "No XP" button was added because at the lower levels it was very easy to outlevel your missions before getting access to them all.

At the game's release, it was intended that many contacts and their missions would be Permanently Missable Content for any player character as a way of further personalizing that character. It eventually became clear that players didn't like this, they could still unlock everything with sufficient care (and preferably certain powersets which provide ways to defeat enemies without being credited for it and rewarded with XP), and that the necessary antisociality happened to make things unfriendly at low levels for genuinely new players looking for their first party. That being a big problem for any commercial MMO, the "No XP" option was added to support grinding (and Self Imposed Challenges) by letting players join groups and play without ruining their "records".

EVE Online does away with xp and levels all together, replacing them with skills that are learned in real time. This doubles as Anti Poop-Socking too since the skill training continues whether you are logged on or not.

Final Fantasy XIV originally had a "Fatigue" system that gradually reduced the amount of experience points you could gain in one class if you did too much grinding, forcing you to switch to another class if you wanted to continue having 100% returns. Due to some misinformation about the specifics (people assumed that it would punish everyday players, when in fact the Fatigue cap was set so high that you would have had to grind as your full-time job for it to have an effect) it proved massively unpopular and was shelved completely after a few months.

Like most of the other MMORPGs on this list, Guild Wars has monsters start giving less experience, then eventually none, as you gain levels. On top of that, characters max out their levels and gear fairly quickly through each campaign (or start with max level if they're Pv P only). The game was designed from the ground up to put veterans and relative n00bs on equal footing, rewarding skill and strategy instead of the number of hours you've invested. You can certainly grind for money and materials for spiffy wardrobes and more skill and equipment options, but they won't necessarily make you any stronger. Averted in that there are easily unlockable upgrade runes for Pv P, and Subverted in how the PvE runes require grinding, but the enemy mobs are easy enough to defeat without them anyway.

Considering the game was designed with an anti-grinding philosophy, it's funny that trying to get to the maximum level in the tutorial world has gained something of a following, to the point where the developers have started adding content to support it. As enemies eventually stop giving XP, this seems like an impossible task, if it wasn't for the fact that enemies can actually gain levels of of killing you. This means that hordes of playerlevel grind an enemy monster so that its level increases enough to give experience to high-level players.

The sequel plays this trope both ways; higher level characters that get into lower level areas are leveled down to the "top" for the given chunk of the map; walk into the fresh-out-of-the-tutorial spot for any given race, for example, and you're now level 5. However, you still have a sizable increase to your stats thanks to your much better gear, and you still gain a good chunk of XP from killing monsters and running events; many people have gotten to level 80 just running around in a single starting area. The major discouragements are that you do not get the bonuses from exploring areas and getting map completions and you're far less likely to get higher level crafting materials except by breaking down random drops. The system's entire purpose is to allow higher-level character to run around with their lower-level friends without receiving any noticeable amount of reward.

New Worlds Ateraan stops players from overdoing things via a 'borg' meter that gets higher with each kill. If you go into the red, your character is marked as a bloodthirsty killer and conflict roleplay might commence.

Pirate 101 plays this straight from the get go. Yeah you can try grinding for hours to level up, but it will be faster and easier to just do quest.

In the MMORPG Pirates of the Caribbean Online, it looks like the levels of the enemies in the Black Pearl Boss Fight actually change based on the level of the player who initiated the fight. This becomes a big problem if you're a higher level (but not level 30 and don't have the Voodoo Staff yet) than the rest of your party.

In RuneScape, The experience needed to level up an item increases exponentially, doubling roughly every 7 levels. This discourages level grinding on low level items, as the xp just isn't fast enough for the higher levels. There is also a skill called "slayer" which can only be leveled at a significant speed by only killing some monsters of one kind, then you can't get experience anymore until you get a new monster to kill. It's intended to discourage one-monster-type grinding where everyone on the server wants to grind the same monster type and cause lag. Another example would be the random events, that force players to keep attention to their game instead of clicking a few times an hour, and have the dual purpose of preventing the use of bots. Random events were removed from the game in 2012, although they are still present in Old School RuneScape.

Wizard 101 starts out with level grinding as a viable but slightly tedious since the player receives experience from a fight not based on how strong the enemies were but the number of pips used fighting the enemies. However it Quickly becomes impractical since the amount of experience required to level up without doing missions means doing hundreds of fights using up as many pips as possible.

World of Warcraft has severe diminishing returns for experience gain once you outlevel enemies by five or more. Gray enemies give no experience at all, and gray quests give a paltry amount. However, gear is more important than XP and there are plenty of other things to grind for.

Reputation gains used to suffer from the same diminishing returns once you outleveled the mobs/quests you earned them from, but this had the effect of making certain older reputations difficult to the point of Permanently Missable to acquire for high level players, and was reversed in a patch.

Amusingly averted in the South Park episode based on the game, when the boys were forced to grind to max level by repeatedly killing the lowest level boars for weeks on end, in a noob-zone that the episode's villain wouldn't bother entering.

By request of the People's Republic of China, the Chinese client cuts experience gain by 50% after 6 hours of play, and cuts it out completely after 12.

In the game's original alpha and beta versions, they were much more direct. The longer you played for one session, the less XP you would get, until your character logged out and got some rest. Players complained, and the system was later reversed; rather than lowering your XP gains for long periods of play, you instead gained a bonus XP multiplier after being logged out for some time. It served the same purpose, but rather than feeling punished for playing, players felt rewarded for taking breaks, which felt much better.

In certain areas, the moment you hit a given level your XP gains drop massively. In the Death Knight and Demon Hunter starting zones, once you hit 60 and 100 respectively, even quests give less than a quarter the experience they did a level prior. Likewise after Legion debuted, all quests and treasures in Draenor give only a couple thousand experience the instant you hit 100.

However, by unlocking a certain element, you can gain enough experience to completely max out all your levels in the first two stages of the game.

Sonic Colors's Gameplay Grading is based on Scoring Points, but the game prevents you from infinitely repeating some task (like using Wisps) by throwing out a "TIME'S UP" penalty if you take too long in a given stage, preventing you from getting any more points, even end-of-stage bonuses. Since a lot of your points come from end-of-stage Ring and time bonuses, getting a TIME'S UP guarantees you will not get an S rank.

Puzzle Game

Lower-level enemies in Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords will scale up to your character's level... up to a point. Then the rewards you get for will scale inversely, to the point where the only XP and gold you get from fighting inferior foes come from whatever coins and purple stars you clear from the game board. Many of the missions also have level requirements, making sure you can't get a cheap level boost by grabbing advanced missions and grinding till you beat them. Then again, you can get around these limits, somewhat, once you purchase the Temple upgrade for your citadel.

Real Time Strategy

In Age of Empires III, the maximum exp allowed per game is 30,000. Afterwards, while you can still get exp in-game for more Home City shipments, you will no longer be able to get anymore exp for your level aside from rewards post-game.

In Space Pirates and Zombies You can only collect Rez and goons and upgrade to larger hanger hulls up to a certain limit until you advance on to the next segment of the story. Using mods you can raise/remove this limit and...well it leaves you Underrated And Overleveled.

Starcraft II: While it's possible to replay levels in order to get achievements or research power-ups that you missed the first time around, you can only do so with the units you had then (no upgrading that level's units and replaying it or bringing battlecruisers in the second level). There was a Good Bad Bug where replaying old levels still counted the research found towards your total (at some point it caps out, and you get money instead to get all the upgrades for your units). Averted in Heart of the Swarm, where you can replay missions with every unlocked unit, switch Kerrigan's abilities and unit variation, making achievements much easier to obtain.

In Warcraft III, if you are playing Campaign, you can only gain one level per hero per map.

Except in Frozen Throne's grand finale, where Arthas can go from level 1 to level 10 if you kill enough enemies (and with a pretty much infinite supply coming from Illidan's naga camp, why wouldn't you?). This is because he started the campaign at the maximum level, reflecting where he was in the storyline at the time, and lost a level in every mission due to an attack on his master's power base. Of course, since it IS the grand finale, these levels won't actually go anywhere.

In Skirmish, your heroes will only gain experience from creeps up to level 5 (though only in the expansion). Admittedly, there is nothing stopping you from mauling player units...

Role Playing Game

Agarest Senki has a turn counter. If you grind, the turn counter goes up. Higher turn count makes some events become unavailable and lowers bonus and reward some plot-related battles offer. US release modded the game so players can grind in the dungeons without increasing turns. The result is some players leaving their Xbox and auto-battle all day long because the game actually has a lot of features that encourage people to grind, like title gaining and equipment smithing.

The Atelier series tends to punish level grinding and encourage other ways of surpassing obstacles. The most obvious method is the time limit in games prior to Shallie: spend too long killing monsters for experience, and you'll run out of time. Additionally, the bonuses from levelling up tend to be quite minor outside of sometimes learning new skills at specific levels, and experience gain is lowered against weak enemies. Most of the time, if you're having trouble, the solution lies not in increasing your levels, but in using the game's Item Crafting system to make better bombs, healing items, and equipment, which have a much bigger impact that your level.

Avernum, Geneforge, and other games from Spiderweb Software discourage grinding elegantly, and still reward thorough exploration. The margins for XP diminish to a trickle at around the time the player is expected to progress in the game and story; this has the added consequence of balancing combat-based with puzzle-solving character builds. A player who stays to grind will spend hours advancing as far as he or she could just by visiting the next town/city/settlement. Toward the Very Definitely Final Dungeon, the player could still try to squeeze some levels out of the Bonus Dungeon, but that's always far more challenging than simply facing the endgame. Beating the bonus and carrying away all prizes does give bragging rights though, and makes the endgame a breeze.

In the original Exile series, entire dungeons (minus the named bosses) would respawn after a while. This was removed in the Avernum remakes, which also made grinding harder.

In Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, enemies don't respawn and due to the slow rate of gaining levels and the game's relatively short length, you'll probably be coasting around the final boss at about level 15. To circumvent this, your characters obtain all their skills early or through story events and battles are based more on skill then stats.

You can't level-grind in Blackguards, because there are simply a limited number of battles. There will come a point when you have completed every side quest, and since there are no Random Encounters, literally the only thing left to do is the endgame. The only way to make sure your party is strong enough for it is to have allocated your skill points well during the game.

Borderlands does this also using the "diminishing returns" principle, where enemies at a lower level than you give less and less experience the farther ahead of them you are, to the point where you stop receiving XP from them. Turning in quests, however, will always give a flat amount of experience depending on the quest, but at a certain point it may not be enough to move your XP bar any noticeable amount. These rules also apply to multiplayer games, which often results in the lower-leveled members of any given party gaining levels in leaps and bounds (as the amount of given XP increases with the amount of players, as well as increasing the levels of the monsters you fight) while other, more experienced party members receive little reward for their efforts.

Also, the game only gives you a small fraction of the XP you'd normally get if you kill an enemy using the Runner, to dissuade players from merely driving back and forth over Skags for an hour. The sound enemies make when squished under a car, though, never stops being funny.

In Brave Fencer Musashi, a level cap is placed on each stat, which increases every chapter. While this doesn't prevent grinding, it does limit the amount of grinding that can be done at any particular point in the game.

Being an action RPG, the stats are mostly negligible. In fact, many people who have played the game never realized there were stats, presumably because the stat caps are so easily reached and throughout the rest of the chapter there are no stat ups to remind you that there were stats to level up.

Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter does this to a bit of an extreme. Not only do enemies do not respawn, but you're expected to just start a New Game+ (which is available from the get go) on your first run because the enemies are really challenging. However, there are some loopholes that allow you to ultimately end up with stronger characters by repeating boss battles: this involves abuse of party XP, which is carried over unlike normal XP when you use the SOL system to revert your game to the last save point. It also allows you to use your Purposely Overpowered dragon form to finish the said battles even faster (since while the D-Counter can never be lowered normally, SOL Restoring your game to your last save point allows you to revert it to whatever value it was at before you went on a rampage with it), allowing you to net even more party XP than you normally would.

Child of Light uses skill caps at certain stages of the game to do this: Leveling earns you skill points you can apply to a number of skill trees to improve defense, offense, special abilities, etc., which are arranged in three tiers. Once you max out a given tree, no matter how high you level you can not begin applying skill points to the next tier until you pass certain plot points ( defeating Crepusculum earns you tier two, while slaying Nox unlocks tier three). You can continue leveling even after maxing out a tier, but until you complete the required plot point you can't apply your acquired skill points.

Chrono Cross only allows character's stats to improve a small amount for each boss they defeat, allowing a small amount of grinding in between bosses, but directly basing the player's power to the number of bosses they defeated. You CANNOT advance stats past specific points until you fight the next boss. You can grind your other party members with relative ease. Of course, New Game+ lets you finally crush those annoying early-game bosses.

Conception II: Children of the Seven Stars looks like it plays it straight, but is actually a subversion. Once the main character gets strong enough, monsters on the field become blue and look visibly weaker, allowing you to kill them by merely running into them. However, it also gives experience as if you fought the monster normally. Considering you can only bring one of seven heroines in a dungeon at a time, this is a great way to help bring weaker heroines up to level.

In Dark Chronicle, you level up your weapons rather than your party members, and then use items to upgrade them into better models. Grinding works up to a point, with the usual law of diminishing returns in effect, but upgrading your weapons to some of the higher-powered models additionally requires you to defeat certain monsters. The required monsters can usually only be found in later chapters of the game.

The party in Darklands can rent a room and find tutors to visit the inn and teach them many valuable skills, but staying in one place for too long will decrease their local reputation, eventually forcing the heroes to leave the city or have trouble with the law.

Dark Messiah makes grinding completely impossible: XP is awarded only for advancing in the story.

In Dhux's Scar, returning to previously-cleared areas costs one PE, and using too many PE locks you out of the good ending. Since you need to leave the area to visit a Trauma Inn or restock supplies, only limited grinding is possible in each area before moving on, so it's still not a good idea. The one exception is a forest that has a store in the middle of it, which makes grinding in that area much less costly.

Digimon World 2 puts a level cap for digimon. Once you hit those levels, the only way to level up again afterward is to combine it with another digimon, creating a new digimon that starts out at either level 1, 11, or 21 depending on the class of the combined digimon. The cap is raised higher with each subsequent combination.

Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga's introductory village, Farglow, features a training area where the player is allowed to fight low-level goblins as many times as he or she pleases. Obviously, this would have been easy to exploit for a slight head start in character progression. Unsurprisingly, though, the developers decided to program the training goblins so that each kill was only worth 1 experience point. Still, it was a great help to the players who inevitably decided to go nuts with their newly obtained mind reading ability, which incurs an experience debt for each use.

BioWare really, really tried to implement this in Dragon Age: Origins. There are Random Encounters on the world map (in addition to pre-plotted non-random ones) but they become rarer and rarer the more of them you clear, and the enemies in the static areas never respawn, so the dungeons that were cleared out stay clear. However, the devs have overlooked the Allied Crates exploit (described in detail in the corresponding Level Grinding entry), which allows you to convert money into levels at a fairly affordable price.

Also, you can abuse the glitch in Ostagar where you continually get EXP despite only doing half of what Duncan asked. It's incredibly easy (and tedious) to get to the level cap of 25 with this.

Dragon Age: Inquisition does this not just by having enemies scale with you (a Spellbinder at level 3 is tough but one at 18 is virtually invincible) if you grind more than 3 levels you no longer gain experience.

Dragon Ball Z: Legend of the Super Saiyan for SNES has a similar system to Golden Sun ; once charcters' battle point reach certain amount, random battles will be shut off. In addition, by the beginning of Vegeta arc, if you spend time leveling up Gohan and Piccolo rather than go and look for the rest of Z-Figthers to recruit then grind. All of them will be killed by Nappa, and Gohan will have to navigate major parts of Namek after that alone.

In Dragon Ball Z: Gokuu Gekitouden for Game Boy, you can level grind, and if you do you'll easily beat every enemy in the game. Even Frieza. However, if your characters are above a certain level when you beat Frieza you'll be locked out of the true ending.

In Dragon Quest VII, while you can still get experience points from battles, eventually you stop leveling up your jobs that give you new skills and abilities if the monsters are too low a level. There is one area at the end of the game that will always give you EXP for your jobs.

Dragon Quest VI worked exactly the same way, and the DS remake removed the level limit from even more areas, allowing you to max out your jobs even earlier.

Also in Dungeons & Dragons Online You get penalties for repeating dungeons for experience and treasure. There are also wilderness areas, each of which has a level range. You must be above the minimum level to enter the area, but if you are above the maximum level you get reductions to the XP earned for killing monsters (a more above the max level you are, the bigger the reduction in XP).

Dungeon Siege nicely plays this by making enemies finite; in short, any enemy you kill is dead for real and will never respawn again.

The full conversion, Mage World, completely inverts this. Not only does the author not consider it a cheat, he actually encourages grinding on the relatively easy home rows. Enemies are still finite, but the home row includes pells and target ranges to increase combat skills without fighting actual enemies.

The series in general has long used the form of "increase skills to level up", and the simplest way to increase skills is to use them. As you improve your skills through successful uses of said skills, it becomes increasingly difficult to raise the skill further. This makes high-level skill grinding quite tedious.

In Oblivion, your enemies level up with you. If you don't manage the system carefully and don't get high enough attribute gains, or level exclusively in non-combat skills, you can screw yourself over pretty good when you start running into monsters "just two levels below you" that pound you into the ground. Essentially, Oblivion's highly broken level scaling system punishes you for not being a Munchkin. Most guides actively encourage you to avoid leveling up at all costs (mostly by avoiding rest), which ironically allows you to become a juggernaut since your skills will still increase. This leads to Tamriel being saved from a horde of extremely feeble monsters by a strangely competent insomniac.

After the broken system in Oblivion, Skyrim implemented several improved methods to combat grinding. Taking a note from their Fallout sister series, enemies within an area scale to whatever level you are when you first enter that area. Additionally, you now have to spend all your abilities (but not perks) at the one time, so you can only recharge health, stamina, and magicka through leveling up once. Finally, it keeps the (rather justifiable) logic that leveling up non-combat skills still means facing stronger enemies who have scaled to your level.

Eternal Eyes makes it so that the higher your level is in relation to the enemies in the area you're in, the fewer EXP you'll gain per hit, and the fewer Bonus EXP you reach for clearing a stage. You'll also gain progressively less EXP if you continue to grind on one stage for a long time. However, having a weaker unit attack a stronger one results in that unit gaining more EXP—just make sure to stay far away unless you like that unit dying.

Etrian Odyssey does a fair amount of this by making healing potions and member recovery fees relatively expensive and scaling Inn prices with party level. The price goes up for 1en for each level of each character, so if you've got 5 level 50 characters in your party, it'll cost you 250en to sleep in the Inn each time. Best to save up those monster parts you've been hocking. Same thing goes for revival, 5en per level.

In Spiderweb's Exile it's pretty much impossible to gain levels beyond 47 because of the seriously diminished amounts of experience enemies give (sometimes none at all), the fact that baddies from random encounters start to flee from you more and more often, and due to (apparently) a bug that occasionally causes your experience to start decreasing instead of going up. Fortunately, experience doesn't change at level-up (like other games that reset it to zero) so there's no getting negative experience or losing levels. However, there's still those handy Knowledge Brews that give you skill points, so you can abuse those while grinding for gold.

Fallout: New Vegas places a Beef Gate directly in the path of the main storyline, but strews the intended long route with more than enough sidequest experience to make grinding unnecessary. This also gradually introduces many locations with later significance. Four different DLC addons each add five levels to the cap to allow for the leveling you will do while in each one. The general rule with Fallout 3 and up is that grinding for its own sake generally isn't necessary. You can make sufficient progress just on the main quest line to complete the game competently while side quests have the added benefit of building you up even more in their undertaking.

The number of skill points given per battle are a function of the skill's current level and the enemies' "rank". If your skill level is higher than the enemies' rank plus the number of uses in the battle, you get no skill points at all. Despite the skill level cap being 16, leveling any skill past 10 is very difficult.

Gaining HP is easy, and the original Famicom version has an HP cap of 65535. However, some attacks have the property of draining 1/16 of maximum HP per hit regardless of defense, and in the final dungeon there are enemies with eight-hit attacks that have that property. If you equipped enough heavy armor to lower your evasion rate to 0%, you will lose over half your HP with each attack, and if you ground up your HP no healing will keep up with the damage. This combined with the maximum number of hits a character can dodge only increasing when targeted by an enemy results in an ugly Difficulty Spike when players who ground stats by attacking their own party reach the final dungeon.

Final Fantasy IV: The After Years imposes easily-reached level caps on the characters of each specific tale, roughly corresponding to their overall strength. When they do finally meet up in the final chapter, you can freely level them all up to lv99. The maximum amount of Gil you can carry is also limited to 99999 in each tale, but you can always circumvent this by buying a lot of expensive items to sell for later, and in the final chapter the enemies drop such ridiculous amounts of Gil that it becomes more or less useless.

To discourage players from Level Grinding their way to the end, Final Fantasy VIII modifies the enemies' stats based on your characters' levels and emphasizes its junctioning system instead, where characters' stats can be increased by attaching magic spells to them. Of course, this has the practical effect of swapping Level Grinding with Magic Grinding, forcing players to endlessly draw spells from enemies if they want to stay competitive.

One of the absurd implication was during the timed mission to defeat and recruit Odin. Player has 20 minutes to do so upon entering the location. A lot of Power Players ended up runing the whole preliminary routine in less than 7, and then drawing extremely potent Triple spell from him for 10 minutes straight.

Defeating an enemy by turning it into a card gave you no experience but did give you AP to increase the abilities of your guardian forces. This ultimately resulted in being able to coast through the game at around level 8-10 and equipping all the most ridiculous spell junctions in the game by transforming everything into cards. In some ways, Final Fantasy VIII was easier to break by avoiding any levels than any other Final Fantasy is by Level Grinding. It did require some progress in the game before this method became very efficient, but at that point, it became very easy.

Despite having no traditional levels to speak of, Final Fantasy XIII manages this by putting arbitrary ceilings on the Crystarium, its character advancement system. No matter how many Crystarium Points you earn, you'll only be able to move to specific points on the chart. Where you can move on this chart is dependent on your point in the story, so it's necessary to advance the plot to advance your character.

To illustrate: A "good" respawnable encounter for CP in Chapter 10 gives around 600+ CP. The nodes and abilities in the sort of "mini-stage" unlocked after finishing Chapter 9 all cost around 775 CP apiece, and there are roughly a half-dozen-plus nodes. Once you beat the boss midway through Chapter 10, though, the Crystarium stage unlocked has 30+ nodes and each cost somewhere between 4000 and 10000 CP apiece. This isn't even getting into the secondary roles unlocked around this time, where even the lowest-level nodes cost 3000 CP, and up to 120000 CP for a single node.

Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII plays with this. On one hand, the game has no explicit level system, and the only way to earn stat upgrades is as rewards for completing quests. On the other, usable abilities, money and some gear can only be acquired by killing the (generally limited) supply of monsters. Get a little too zealous in hunting a specific type of monster and you can bring them to the edge of extinction, triggering the appearance of their Last One variant. These fights can range from barely different from a normal fight up to Demonic Spiders or even That One Boss depending on your relative strength. Once you take out the Last One, that monster type is gone forever. To make things even murkier, all monsters get a power boost after Day 7, which also increases the power of the abilities they drop, meaning over-hunting a specific monster type too soon robs you of stronger abilities. Finally, actually hunting as many monsters as possible to extinction makes the last dungeon and the Bonus Dungeon that much easier, and a side quest that can only be completed by starting a New Game+requires you to fill out your Bestiary, which means encountering all of the Last Ones.

Final Fantasy Tactics does something similar, in that you get fewer XP for hitting an enemy whose level is lower than yours, and more for hitting higher-level enemies. Of course, the enemies in random encounters match your average party level, so perhaps this was only intended to encourage a balanced-level party.

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance also awarded EXP for healing or buffing allies, but made itself highly abusable that way as well. Since you'd always get 10 EXP (and 100 EXP needed for each level) if the target had the same level, 2 Jugglers could just pass turns between each other for all eternity with Smile Toss or Quicken (which does cost mana). The sequel averted that method by only giving out EXP at the end of the battle, with a large portion of exp being static (up to 60) with small bonuses going to especially valuable party members.

You could grind your high level characters indefinitely by using self-targeting moves (such as Accumulate from the Squire class, or Chakra from the Monk class if you've taken damage) which will always give 10 EXP per action. Provided that you can last long enough, you could theoretically take a party from level 1 to level 99 in one fight - and it's fairly easy to reduce the enemy side to one completely irrelevant unit. That being said, it still takes a really long time and isn't generally worth it, though it can be useful when grinding for job points.

Another, more subtle way that FFT discourages level grinding is by making your characters fairly gear dependent. You need to proceed with the game to access stores with better gear. Since the random encounters level up with you, they can become quite difficult if you level grind too long. There are ways around this, but they are more trouble than they're worth

Final Fantasy Tactics A2 has this for the final battle once you beat the game and attempt to beat it again; the final bosses and its allies will be around your party's average level. So if the final bosses were around level 50, and then you beat the game and level up 10 more times, their levels will match yours.

Gladius limits your ability to level up and gain gladiators in the first two areas you explore. In the first area you are limited to eight gladiators of maximum level five and in the second area you are limited to twelve gladiators of maximum level ten. Only after reaching the third area can you max out at up to twenty gladiators at level thirty.

Golden Sun actually limits the number of enemies you can possibly fight in the first dungeon; after so many, they just stop appearing. The cutoff is tied to your character's level. However, killing Jenna averts this, since dead characters gain no EXP.

Gothic features non-respawning enemies to prevent grinding, though a new monster will spring forth from the surviving ones' loins every few days. This means that it is theoretically possible to hunt the monsters to extinction, which makes sense given that the game takes place in a two-square-mile Penal Colony cut off from the rest of the world by a magical death-barrier.

Each of the original .hack// games had a level cap built in, mainly so that you don't start out way too strong on the next installment. The only game in which this was really noticeable was the first: Infection. Even once you've hit the level cap (around 30), the Final Boss, Skeith, is enormously difficult, and for once simply grinding past his strength level is not an option.

For an extreme example, RPG parts of Half-Minute Hero reduce grinding time by adding a (usually) 30-second time limit to complete the mission which can only be prolonged a few times. It is also combined with Forced Level-Grinding so players have to use the said time most efficiently to level up so they could take down the boss.

The Inazuma Eleven games (aside from the Japanese version of the first game) have stat caps: Each character has a cap on max GP, max TP, and the sum of the remaining stats. Max GP and max TP aside, if a character's total stats have reached the cap, any further stat training will lower another stat by an equal amount.

Kingdom Hearts II has a grinding cap for Drive Forms and Summons that is tied to the plot. For example, before getting Master Form, it's impossible to grind Valor or Wisdom Forms over level 5.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning also uses the diminishing returns method. Loot dropped by enemies doesn't improve either. And if you are higher level than them (their names are grey), you don't receive Fate energy for killing them either.

Knights of the Old Republic features a limited supply of foes, with only a few exceptions (Hulak Wraid in the Dune Sea and Sith in the Star Forge), and even the exceptions are not worth grinding, since the level cap (20) can be achieved just by the opponents you meet during the game (and you'll hit the cap early on the Star Forge for all characters anyway).

Another (sneaky) trick put in to discourage level-grinding early on in the game is the fact that you're cross-classed on the second planet. Nothing like level-grinding through the rackghouls in the sewers only to discover that you've actually hurt yourself by leveling up on Taris. Also, once per level, you can usually get information about your party members, but only so much. After a certain point, they clam up and won't tell you anything more about their histories until you reach another goalpost (leaving Taris, getting one of the Star Maps).

The Last Remnant has the infamous Battle Rank. This is one level up system which is explicitly bad. The higher the rank gets, the harder the enemies are. So as you fight, your enemies get experience instead of you! The key in the Xbox version is to upgrade your equipment, keep monster fighting to a minimum and go for the strongest possible monsters available during grinding. Most importantly, upgrade your equipment if at all possible. Grinding is a last resort and can only be carried so far before enemies start outpacing you.

The PC version is better balanced for a regular playthrough, and you can beat the game fighting every encounter you normally meet, as long as you don't try to deliberately farm weak monsters excessively. If you go for 100% Completion, this Anti-Grinding measure actually produces much more extreme grinding (with elements of Guide Dang It!), where you find certain monsters that give the most stat/technique gains for the least BP growth and farm them until you are bored out of your mind.

In The Legend of Dragoon, random encounters give pathetic amounts of experience. Bosses, on the other hand, nearly guarantee a level up for every character in your party. There's no need to grind in the first place, but if you try, be prepared to spend a long time hunting enemies. On the other hand, the Addition system in combat is pretty fun, and using Additions over and over again levels them up. So the game is pretty well balanced, and when it's not, it's usually in your favor.

Not only that, but the game also had two very good armor pieces, the Legend Casque and the Armor of Legend, both of which gave a significant boost to a character's defense and could be used by every party member, unlike every other piece of equipment, which was tied to a single character, or only usable by male/female characters. Both armor pieces had only one problem: they cost 10000 gold each, in a game where most equipment usually costs around 150 gold to 800 gold. Needless to say, money grinding is virtually impossible, as most random battles fetch you less than 100 gold.

Live A Live does this on occasion, particularly in the Near Future chapter. Each time Akira levels up, the Preexisting Encounters he can run into on the world map increase in power and use better monsters to fight you with. Akira's abilities are cool, but you may want to save the grinding for the final chapter. In addition, the experience you gain at each encounter is based on your level, to a constant total of 100 for each level up, making this one more example of diminishing returns.

Random encounters in Lords of Xulima are limited; each area has only so many of them before it is considered "cleared", which gives the party a significant one-time experience payout. However, the number of possible encounters is still high enough to make running around an area to gain a few more levels an effective (albeit tedious) tactic.

Lost Odyssey features diminishing returns for fighting in a given area. Each area will generally see the characters advance one or two levels, after which the experience reward from each battle drops sharply, often to a mere 1 point per battle. However, to gain skills for the Immortal characters in your party, you're still going to have to do a fair bit of grinding; it just won't increase your character level very fast. Having Sed around eventually makes it somewhat faster, but it's still a grind nonetheless.

A lot of item farming is required to collect all the components to the various rings. Doing this will potentially have you levelling up several times after the experience bonuses have slowed down to a crawl before you have everything you need.

Furthermore, since every enemy will always give at least 1 exp, every level is only 100 exp apart and you can fight up to 10 enemies in the same battle, you can gain a level every 10 battles even if they're the weakest enemies in the game, and with the Double Experience skill, you can halve that to 5 battles.

In Lunar: The Silver Star the bosses' stats are largely based on Alex's level (multiplied by or added to some number). Thus, the stronger you get, the stronger the bosses get, providing something of a disincentive to level-grinding.

In Lunar: Eternal Blue, if you stay around in the Blue Spire after you pick up Lucia and use her Purposely Overpowered spells to grind for an inordinate amount of time (specifically, until you reach level 7), Lucia will eventually say something like "if we keep doing this we won't get anywhere" and cast a spell to keep monsters from attacking until you leave the tower.

In the Mario & Luigi games (or at least in Bowser's Inside Story), low-powered enemies just plain stop giving you EXP after a certain point, meaning you have to continue on in the story to continue leveling.

None of the enemies in Mass Effect respawn so it's impossible to level grind. If you've unlocked all the XP boosting achievements and have both DLCs, and managed to perform every single side-quest in the game, you'll still be about three levels short of the level cap. And it will take you most of your New Game+ to actually reach the cap.

Mass Effect 2 does away with combat XP altogether, replacing it with fixed rewards for story and side missions, at the rate of 1 per level and 4 per level, respectively. It also throws you into some storyline missions based on how many missions you have done, limiting how much you can grind for them. However, the game's Absurdly Low Level Cap means that you'll probably reach maximum level by somewhere between 1/2 and 3/4ths of the way through, depending on how many DLCs you have and whether you imported a character from Mass Effect 1 (if you import a level 60 character from Mass Effect 1, you start at level 5 in Mass Effect 2).

Might and Magic 4 and 5 joined together to create a super-game. You could use the same characters to travel back AND forth between the two worlds. As you can imagine, with two entire game worlds to explore, you could level to ridiculous heights. Unfortunately, the real stopping resource wasn't experience points, but money. Monsters didn't respawn (and the few that did gave no gold or items) and leveling up costed exponentially more gold pieces (Specifically, to train one character from level x to level x+1 cost 10*x^2 GP). It was actually most efficient to skip all the 'level up for free' rewards entirely until you had bottomed out on training realistically, but you could always work one week for 50 gold (or something like that). This became a factor when you realise characters had real ages that went up and required 50,000,000 gold to go from 1xx to 1xx+1.

In the Mystery Dungeon games there was a limit on each floor of the dungeon. After a certain number of turns you will get a series of warnings. If you fail to heed that warning you are automatically kicked from the dungeon, which has the same effect as dying.

Neverwinter Nights has limited ways of gaining XP with few areas containing respawning enemies. You also gain less XP for fighting foes with a low combat rating .

Neverwinter Nights 2 just has a limited supply of enemies, until one irritating section at the very end with infinite enemy respawns. The expansion has enemies everywhere slowly respawn, presumably so the game's hunger system doesn't kill you. However, the third expansion has random encounters on the world map and separate encounter XP along with the individual monster XP, making grinding more viable.

Nocturne: Rebirth plays with this, since it implements a Brave Clear system to encourage players to beat the boss within a certain level. At the same time, the item drop rate is really low and practically necessitates endless fighting. Additionally, familiars level far slower to the point where it'll still take a fair amount of grinding to get them to the Brave Clear level.

Ogre Battle's battle system discourages and encourages grinding through the alignment system. Basically, you can grind as much as you like (enemies are practically finite, but plentiful), but attacking enemies that are lower level than you is evil and causes your alignment score to go down. Level grind that Knight too much, and he'll never advance into a Paladin. Of course, certain classes require a low alignment, so level grinding those characters is recommended.

Subverted in that random encounters are available in infinite, if slow quantities on many maps, and that many of these are pure evil critters like ghosts and skeletons, which impart significantly reduced alignment penalties (and massive bonuses at low levels!). This is so much the case that it's possible to access many of the game's upper-tier unit types barely 1/4 of the way into the game with no penalty to speak of, save wasted time.

In the first two Paper Mario games, each time you level up, the number of Star Points you can get from enemies decreases by 1, so that eventually, you can't get any from the enemies you can currently face. (The second game does, however, give you a consolation point if the enemies don't give any.) Then, in the next area, new enemies appear, the enemies start giving Star Points again, and you can resume Level Grinding.

Paper Mario: Sticker Star got rid of the level-up system altogether. The only way to get more powerful stickers is to continue through the game and get them from stronger enemies, pull them off the environment of a new area, or buy them from newly-reached stores. Grinding against weaker enemies in earlier areas of the game simply results in you wasting your good stickers against monsters that were only a challenge when you had weaker stickers. Even the Surplus Damage Bonus coins you get for heavy-hitting and/or multi-hitting attacks against these weak enemies pale in comparison to the automatic coin reward from stronger enemies and the massive number of coins you get for finding new level goals. The Heart Container items even increase the damage you give when jumping on or hammering the Pre Existing Encounters, to the point where earlier enemies can be One Hit Killed without ever having to go to the battle screen.

Parasite Eve does this to an extent. As you continue to traverse a given area, encounters in that area will become rarer and rarer, to the point where it becomes extremely impractical to keep entering and exiting a room over and over again in the hopes of getting attacked.

However, if you can manage to grind Aya's level up to 38 (which is not an easy task, given the above mechanic), you only need 4500 XP (a comparatively paltry amount for that point in the game) to gain every level after that.

The sequel does something similar by having a fixed number of enemies to fight in each area. YMMV as to whether you'd consider fighting every single one a form of grinding or just being thorough, since elimination of such creatures is explicitly stated as being Aya's job in the game.

The Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness games have non-respawning enemies, a level cap for each game (like .hack above), and rewards exp even to those who were down at the end of the battle.

Phantasy Star IV is an unintentional example of this: if you grind your characters to 99, their stats will glitch out. They might drop down to lv 40-50 range, androids may gain TP and Mental stats that they're not supposed to have and can't use since they have no Techs and random skills might have their maximum use counts reset to 0, essentially deleting that skill entirely. This was fixed in the Virtual Console rerelease.

In Pokémon, Pokemon of certain levels that were traded to you will only obey you if you have certain badges. This isn't so much to restrict level-grinding per se, but primarily to restrict your buddy trading you (or giving yourself from another game) a level 100 Mewtwo to you so you can finish the game in an hour.

Of course, it was only done with Pokemon that didn't have your Trainer ID. Nothing stopping you from trading your level 6 Charmander to your buddy and have him train it to a level 70 Charizard with Flamethrower and Earthquake...

Played straight and inverted with Pokémon Black and White and Pokémon Sun and Moon's experience system. All Pokémon now receive an additional experience modifier based on the ratio between user and opponents' respective levels; as your party members level up, the same opponents (e.g. wild Pokémon) award fewer experience points than they did before. On the flipside, this means that low-level party members (such as freshly bred Pokémon) level up faster when you defeat high-level opponents (especially since it stacks with all the other modifiers, like the bonus on traded Pokémon or Trainer battles, and the Exp. Share).

Pokémon Black 2 and White 2 has more trainer rematches, lots of wild Audino, and a much more generous helpful of healing items to mitigate the old need to grind for hours.

Dojos in Join Avenue also lets you just pay to have your Pokemon level upnote You could do this before with the Daycares, but that required taking thousands of steps and could accidentally delete moves you can't replace, although there is a limit to how much you can do this in a day and they can't learn level-up moves this way (necessitating going to a move relearner) nor will they evolve when reaching the needed level.

Quest 64 used a system that boosts stats that are used often: taking damage raises HP and DEF, using spells raises MP, and running around raises EVA. Although you can max your EVA by running in circles all night in a safe zone, it becomes difficult to raise your DEF, potentially making the endgame very difficult.

Robopon 2 does this in an interesting (and infuriating) way. Your robots can evolve, but when they do, their level drops by half, so you have to build them up again. No matter what their evolutionary stage, they eventually reach a stat cap, which means that even though their level increases, their stats won't.

Romancing SaGa series features a hidden ER system that triggers and shuts down quests based on your battle count. Some quests and recruitable characters are permanently lost if you spend too much time grinding.

Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song has the Event Rank system. Winning battles raises your Event Rank over time, opening more quests while closing others. The worst best example of this would be "Unsettling Settlements", which closes at ER 2. Most characters start at ER 1 (a few start at ER 0), and also have some fights to complete as part of their prologue... making it very difficult to avoid battle and keep the quest open long enough to complete it. Oh, and if you miss "Unsettling Settlements"? You can't delay the Jewel Beast's awakening, meaning that the Frontier is doomed.

Shin Megami Tensei series in general employ this: The higher your main character's level is, the lower the Exp they gain from fighting the same enemies, forcing the player to go fight stronger enemies to speed up their leveling-up. Also, in games where the characters are humans controlling demons, the demons tend to level up even more slowly, and thus forcing the player to gain stronger demons through various means such as negotiation and fusion instead of grinding.

Persona 3 has several measures to keep players from excessive powerleveling. Experience is based on level, so grinding on weak enemies is almost pointless, but for the main character, persona experience is separate from your own. Personas level extremely slowly, and most useful personas are several levels above you, making it even slower. Since stats and skills are based on the persona, while your own level only controls Hp and Sp, grinding is usually less useful than just making a better persona. For other party members, their personas level at the same rate as them, but this still leaves them far behind the MC, who can easily be fusing personas many levels higher than anyone else.

After characters fight a certain number of enemies, the character will be inflicted with "Tired" status. All of the character's stats drop a considerable amount, making battles risky to fight. When any party member returns to the lobby while "Tired", they will leave the dungeon, and will not fight for a few days, depending on how many battles they fought while "Tired". Returning to the lobby also heals all party members' Hp and Sp, and is the only place where you can save in the dungeon, meaning avoiding the lobby to keep party members from leaving is not always the best idea.

A more direct example is the Reaper. Hang around a floor too long, and a nigh-invulnerable shadow will show up to ruin your night. It is possible to kill him, but doing so requires either abusing the Armageddon fusion spell that kills everything instantly, or having a party powerful enough to beat the final boss with no effort anyway. Killing him does unlock a secret dungeon full of high-level enemies that can boost you to level 100 easily, but by then you definitely won't need it.

Persona 4 gets rid of "Tired" status entirely and instead the lobby will no longer heal the party's HP and SP. SP restoring items are hard to come across early game until you are given a way to heal SP in exchange for Yen by the second dungeon, however it costs a large amount of money until you increase the Hermit Social Link, but by then you probably will not need it anymore, since you gain a few methods of recovering SP after battle.

Golden gives Golden Hands a large amount of experience and Yen, making grinding significantly easier. They have a shocking amount of defense, but it can be easily avoided with damage dealing items, or by triggering All- Out Attacks via critical hits.

Persona 5 incorporates elements from 3 and 4: The Protagonist's Persona gain experience slower than he does, making it easier to fuse new Persona to get new abilities than fighting random Shadows. Story dungeons become inaccessible after finishing them. And finally, the Reaper will show up in the Randomly Generated Mementos dungeon if you hang around a floor too long, encouraging you to continue deeper.

Like in Persona 4, returning to the lobby doesn't restore your HP and SP. However, there's no option to spend money to recover your SP. Instead, SP restoring items are more readily available, but only if you've raised certain Confidants that allow you to acquire said items. Otherwise, they're just as rare as before.

Devil Survivor and its sequel play with this trope. Initially, the games possess the usual Anti-Grinding method common in SMT (less Exp gained if overleveled, Demons needing too much Exp to level up etc). However, in New Game+, you are given the option to purchase removal of this Anti-Grinding feature to an extent, allowing your party to obtain Exp as normal regardless of level.

The dungeons in Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale actively discourage adventurers from staying too long on any one floor by summoning living balls of pure fire, electricity, and hatred out of nowhere.

In addition, the enemies that spawn on a given level are finite anyway, those less than half your adventurer's level give piddly amounts of experience, and the areas with the weaker enemies have pretty pathetic treasure - and in a game where your primary goal is running an item shop, bad random drops are a bigger problem than usual.

The Suikoden games feature an experience system in which each level is 1000 experience away from the next, and XP rewards are based on a comparison between your level and the enemy's. While this isn't much of a problem if you want to be three or four levels stronger than the local Random Encounters, it's a fairly big one if you want to get further than that. This does help to prevent other party members from falling behind, and to keep the game at a reasonable challenge

It has the odd side effect where if you take a low level character into the final dungeon and kill something, their level could slingshot past everybody who fought their way there. Taken to the extreme in that the least ground characters are the only ones who can reach max level.

Sword of Mana gives a set amount of exp for monsters defeated, but levels shoot up in difficulty every time, and one strategy is to store several level ups to use in boss fights as opposed to using them as you get them. Additionally, if you really have the patience to sit in an area long enough, killing a thousand of any enemy will net you a tough version.

Tactics Ogre has a similar system to the Final Fantasy Tactics and Fire Emblem ones above, with the general standard being that striking a unit the same level as yourself earns you 10 XP, and working from there. However, the game developers were wise enough to include a "Training" mode, accessible from the main map at any time, that pit your units against each other and allowed everyone to grind up, with the only penalty being that enemy units would be the same level as your highest-level character (terrifying in the late-game secret dungeon). Although plot enemies would, with only some late-game exceptions, cap out at level 30 anyway, so it was still possible to grind up and beat the game.

The GBA version also gives out emblems for various in-battle achievements: most of them increase your base stats or they're required for advanced jobs, but some of them have negative effects and once you have one, you can't turn its effect off. 2 of these emblems are gotten by killing 20 targets in training (which increases your damage during training by 25%, meaning you'll be able to get less hits off your targets and thus gain less XP) and gaining a total of 20 levels in training (which makes performing critical hits impossible).

The Tales Series usually has some form of this. Tales of Symphonia, for example, cuts your EXP gains if you're at too high a level compared to the enemies you're fighting. At most, this can halve your EXP gain, making the 10x EXP upgrade in the New Game+ more like 5x EXP.

However, while such encounters are a poor way to grind EXP, they are an excellent way to grind for Grade or items, both of which are easier to obtain when battles are finished quickly and with minimal damage taken.

The Playstation 2 remake of Tales of Destiny surprises level grinders of the tape-the-analog-stick-to-the-right kind by greeting them with Barbatos, a near impossibleBonus Bossfight. It is possible to beat him in the Bonus Dungeon, but not on the overworld map where he appears to punish levelers. He even kicks off the battle with the page quote above.

A slight example exists in Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, where the player characters of the first game do not gain EXP whatsoever and only have different levels and equipment based on your point in the story. This however, doesn't stop you from leveling the two new characters or the monsters.

Unlimited SaGa has this to the point where it can screw you over. The only way to increase your stats is to get Skill Panels. These are mostly given after successfully completing a quest. With the exception of one character there's only a finite amount of quests in the game. Also, killing monsters usually don't net you money and in the long run will make you meet stronger monsters.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines had an ingenious system wherein the player got experience points solely for completing quests, not for defeating enemies. It elegantly provided incentive to seek out sidequests, and made stealth-runs and verbal conflict resolution perfectly effective (exceptfor theScrappy Level.) There are even cases where killing enemies will give you less experience than charming or sneaking your way through, most notably the Elizabeth Dane mission, where killing a guard will not only lower the XP you get, but piss of LaCroix and seriously hamper your ability to get the Downtown haven.

Said system is a more or less faithful adaptation of the Storyteller System of the Old World of Darkness, which was built around this trope and awarded character points for moving the story along rather than just killing things. That said, Bloodlines does dish out character points at a rate that no Game Master would ever allow IRL.

Most of the games in the Ys series decrease the EXP value of the monsters every couple of levels. In some of the games, the EXP of all enemies reduces to 1 well before you can max out. If you fall behind somehow, they go one step further — grinding up to par will take minutes at most because killing anything higher than yourself fills visibly large chunks of your EXP bar. Many versions of the first game prevented grinding in a different way - the max level cap for the entire game was so low that the typical player can reach it halfway through the game without seriously trying, at which point all stat improvement came from finding better equipment.

Falcom did the same thing with Kiseki Series: All monsters have a level, and the experience gained from killing them is a function of the monster's base EXP and the difference between the party's level and the monster's level. This means that an under-leveled party gets extra experience to help level up to where they should be, while an over-leveled party gets virtually nothing.

In War of the Dead, an Action RPG for the PC Engine, the player's EXP could overflow from 9999 to zero. This perverse mechanic was apparently intended to be a feature.

The World Ends with You both averts this and plays it straight with its various level-up systems. The amount of experience needed to reach the next character level increases on a linear scale, making grinding fairly quick and easy compared to most RPGs; however, all this does is increase your HP. To increase your stats, you have to give your characters food and digest it by fighting battles, though they can only eat so many large items every real-world day (though you can keep eating the small items that give +2 or so to a given stat). Lasts, only certain types of pins evolve when leveled up in battle, others involve either turning the game off or using the mingle function.

Xenoblade has its Loads and Loads of Sidequests who, along with money and equipment, also give XP to all members of your party. Granted, you can still grind, but these sidequests give several times more XP than enemies would give you.

Roguelike Games

In most Roguelikes, there are a finite number of levels, and each level is only stocked with monsters and items when it's first generated. While there are Random Encounters, they happen infrequently enough that the scarcity of food forces the player to move forward.

In Ancient Domains of Mystery the higher the kill count for a particular monster race the tougher the members of that monster race become. In extreme instances this can lead to situations where a pack of jackals can kill a demon lord.

Chocobo's Dungeon 2 accomplishes this through four means. The first is limiting recovery items in a game where enemies powerful enough to give you enough EXP to make leveling up on them fairly quick are also deadly enough to make you want to not go out seeking fights with them. The second is setting Doom on you if you spend too long on any one floor in a dungeon. While you can escape from Doom, fighting Doom is a suicidal proposition. Doom can often kill you with one strike, has 32,000 HP, and can shrug off just about anything you can throw at it. The EXP is negligible. And it hunts in packs! Annoyingly, it sometimes seems like the game sometimes gives you floors with no exit. The third method is by having you equipment gradually degrade as you use it. Considering just how much you can put into gear by Item Crafting, and how much easier good kit makes the game, you do not want to wear it out on level grinds. Fourthly, the game makes leveling up by grinding an intensely laborious process.

In Dungeon Crawl, anti-grinding is a core part of the design philosophy. You need to eat if you're not undead, and staying on a level too long causes diminishing enemy spawn rates... although the chance of encountering out of depth enemiesincreases.

And if you waste an absurd number of turns you get a custom Kill Screen just before the turn counter overflows.

To prevent story missions from being too easy, once you receive one, Freelancer prevents you from leveling up any further until you finish it. And then there's the level cap which can only be raised by finishing story missions; the cap is too low for the best fighters in the game until you complete the single-player campaign.

NetHack uses a combination of Rubberband AI and unfeasible numbers of experience points being required at the top end (each level from 21 to 30 requires another ten million XP), although there are instant Upgrade Artifacts available.

There are still infinite level-grinding techniques so easy that a script can run through the busy work for you. At least two of them have inspired anti-grinding community patches.

This in a game where killing Death gives not even 2000 XP. You would need to kill about 50,000 Black Puddings to advance from level 20 to 30, if not for potions of gain level.

"Pudding farming": Find a black pudding, hit it with a dull and rusted weapon so as cause it to split in two but only giving it a little damage, kill one of the puddings while giving the other rest so it heal up to full health, and repeat. The character can eat the corpses created to stave off starvation, gain experience from the kills, pick up the occasional Random Drops, and if there's an altar on the level the corpses can be sacrificed for divine favor.

A wizard who has completed the wizard's quest will regenerate mana quickly enough to be able to spam the "Create Monster" spell and kill the created monsters. This gives the same benefits as pudding farming, with the added benefit that humanoid monsters will drop their equipment and gold when killed.

The Angband based roguelikes require grinding, but it will be tedious if you aren't grinding deep enough. In addition to growth in amount of exp per level, the XP gained by kills is divided by your current level. More strongly enforced is the item-grinding, as there are things that will kill you in one hit without the proper equipment.

In another roguelike, XirrelaiRPG, grinding isn't discouraged much, and levels can be gained extremely quickly by methods such as zombie scumming, and there's no hunger either so you can hang around as long as you like. However, the level cap is only 10, so the relative lack of stat-upgrading items means you'll still find yourself outclassed in last area, which is full of crazy pyromaniacs and blue fairies wearing the third-best armour in the game.

Simulation Game

FTL: Faster Than Light discourages the player from procrastinating in getting to the next sector by having a slowly advancing Rebel Fleet creep from left (where the current sector begins) to right (where the current sector ends). Should the player be unfortunate to jump to a sector within the Rebels' encroachment zone, they will face off against an Elite Fighter with exceptionally strong weapons and defenses. You can't farm these ships for resources, as they will only drop a single fuel cell (the explanation being that you don't have time to grab anything else); thus, your best option is to simply tank the Fighter for long enough for your FTL drive to recharge...or manage to defeat the ship somehow if you're out of fuel.

To further encourage you to push off, the expansion introduces Anti-Ship Batteries, environmental hazards that periodically take shield-piercing shots at you and deal 3 damage if they hit (that's 10% of your maximum health). They are fired from off-screen planetary bases or enemy ships, and one will always be present at a sector occupied by the Rebel Fleet. This is to dissuade players who were able to tank the regular Elite Fighters, allowing them to roam around the sector forever to rack up a higher score.

While Youtubers Life does allow for Stat Grinding to help you build your streaming skills, each phase of your career puts a hard cap on your overall Character Level (the one that governs unlockable items) until you fulfill the quota to move onto the next stage.

Turn Based Strategy

Subverted or Inverted or...something in Disgaea. The game has an Absurdly High Level Cap of 9999, but to beat the story mode you will probably not need to get any higher than level 100 (the post game content however...). To facilitate this, the experience formula changes for enemies at level 99 and above, becoming linear as opposed to exponential. So if you are just going through story mode, you'll find that your progress slows at around this point, so you probably won't accidentally grind your way to the point of making the final boss irrelevant. However, the change in the experience formula also means that level 99 enemies are worth about as much as level 300 enemies, so there is always a level specifically set up by the devs to feature lots of Exp-boosting Geo Effects and enemies that can be boosted to exactly level 99 with a few "Stronger Enemies" bills. This means that experienced players can easily grind their way over this experience "hump" and prepare themselves for the post game.

The Fire Emblem series calculates the experience a character receives in combat based on how powerful the opponent is compared to them, so if you grind your party members to high enough levels, you will end up getting a mere 1 point of experience for each fight. Conversely, defeating enemies much stronger than you gives massive amounts of experience, with many lower level party members able to level up after getting just one kill, and almost all party members getting a level up if they defeat a boss. Since most Fire Emblem games only contain a certain number of enemies, this also helps to prevent grinding. Moreover, in Fire Emblem, the missions are non-replayable, effectively preventing grinding except for Arenas.

Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones averts this trope, not only allowing the player to backtrack to past shops, but giving them a tower that seems to be specifically made for grinding! Not to mention that you get chances to fight past battles over and over again, allowing you to get money and weapons AND allowing the player to run through these with the cheapest weapons money can buy (iron weapons/fire tomes cost almost nothing, and have enough uses for multiple battles). However, Manaketes (arguably the strongest units in terms of attack power) are impossible to grind, as their Dragon Stones have limited uses and cannot be repaired, bar certain Good Bad Bugs.

In Fire Emblem Awakening, the developers seem to have learned their lesson from Sacred Stones. You can grind in skirmishes all you want on Normal mode, but on Hard or above the item that summons Risen costs so much gold to buy that even with the Random Drops you get from enemies, you'll always lose money in the process. But Lunatic Mode is especially cruel about this: not only are Streetpass teams rigged to give out almost no exp, but regular random skirmishes throw Lv 20 promoted enemies with maxed out stats at you when you aren't even a quarter of the way through the game! Even worse, while there is DLC specifically designed to EXP/money grind, it doesn't help that the enemies' levels, stats, skills and abilities scale with how many chapters you've completed (including repeat plays of grind spots), forcing you to min/max and make the most out of every single chapter.

Fire Emblem Fates plays with the trope. You can freely level grind like you could in Sacred Stones and Awakening, but there's a limit to it. Heart Seals (Fates's version of Awakening's Second Seals) still allow you to class-change for new skills, but don't reset you to level 1 like they did in Awakening, so you can't just continually grind for max stats as easily as you could in Awakening. However, the Eternal Seals do allow you to go beyond Level 20... but they cost a whopping 12,000 gold to obtain.

In the original SNES release of Front Mission, there are some (risky) ways to grind for money, but there's almost no way to grind for experience; enemies only offer useful chunks of experience in actual missions, and the enemies are limited in those missions. While you can replay the arena challenges all you like, all you really stand to gain is money, as arena experience quickly becomes a case of diminishing returns. Defeat an enemy enough times in the arena, and he simply stops being profitable in terms of money or experience. It's not uncommon to have even tougher enemies eventually giving you 0 experience points in arena mode.

Considering it's possible to reach the top levels in a single fair-sized map of Heroes of Might and Magic V, it's not really surprising that the campaign features a level cap. It's the map itself that carries the limit, which leads to the odd situation when characters from previous campaigns join up with you and are already beyond it.

The Shining Force games also decrease the experience you can get from enemies as you go up in level, so that if you're intent enough on Level Grinding, they will eventually start not giving any experience. Healers are easier to grind, as the experience from healing only depends on whether the spell/item actually did any healing, and a successful heal spell or healing item will always give a healer at least 10 experience (out of the 100 needed for each level up).

Super Robot Wars uses a similar system to Fire Emblem, although games with units that have the "repair" ability can spam it as long as they like on another unit that has it to gain free experience for as long as they like. It still only allows them to level up their pilots, though: the mecha themselves need to be upgraded with money between stages.

Visual Novel

Monster Girl Quest has scripted fights (Some can be skipped depending on your choices), so it's only ever possible to be as strong as you would be from fighting all available enemies. Thanks to a Good Bad Bug in Chapter 2, though, it is possible to fight Yamata-no-Orochi over and over to level grind.

Tears to Tiara 2 also plays with this. You get less experience against units of increasing lower level. But that doesn't stop you from using skills and items on yourself for experience. It's called "Apple Throwing" which easily allows you to get pretty high on the level curve. If you're a 100% Completion player, unless you only overleveled one character, you can say goodbye to that S-Rank since the game penalizes you for having characters having a higher level compared to the highest leveled campaign enemy on the field.

Other

Several of Atari's arcade games from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s prevented Loophole Abuse in scoring with a rather subtle strategy: Instead of zeroing out players' scores at the start of each new credit, these games ranked players based on their cumulative scores divided by the number of total credits played (e.g. 100,000 points / four credits = ranked score of 25,000).

In Ingress, Portals "burn out" after being hacked enough times within a short period of time, and cannot be used again by the same player for four hours, forcing them to find another portal to get items from. While the Multi-Hack mod can be installed on a Portal to increase the number of hacks before burnout, nothing can manipulate the burnout timer.

In most tabletop RPGs, the GM can decide to stop giving or severely restrict XP to high level characters who look to grind by going to places with lots of low level monsters that they can easily kill in one turn. Depending on the GM, he of course ALSO has the ability to replace the goblins and what not the PCs THINK they're about to go slaughter for easy XP with say, high level dragons...

Another variation is once PCs reach a certain level, most of their XP will be from completing quests/storylines as a whole, with maybe only specific enemy XP given out for the higher level baddies they defeat.

In Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition, the amount of XP you get from a given monster shrinks as you level up, and is cut off to nothing when you are more than eight levels above what you should be. Of course, usually you'll end up more challenging monsters after whenever you level up, anyway.

In all Palladium Books games, three ranges of XP are assigned to Minor/Average/Major threats. The GM decides how to classif them relative to you. An enemy who was a major threat before can shrink to minor if you gain power or tactical advantage. If you severely outclass them they may not even be considered a minor threat and give no XP at all, or a collective group of enemies might qualify as a singular minor threat.

Pinball

Pinball example: In Star Trek (Stern), it was discovered very early on that you could advance all six of the Level 1 missions without penalty simply by catching the ball on the flipper and waiting it out until time runs out. This cleared the mission, and upon clearing all six, Kobayashi Maru Multiball would begin. This would prove incredibly boring to watch and, according to some top players, boring to play. Subsequent patches to this game increased point values for Kobayashi Maru Multiball based on points earned during the Level 1 missions, froze the timer if the game figures the player isn't doing anything, greatly increased points earned by actually shooting the correct shots for Level 1 missions, and awarded broze, silver, or gold medals for having made enough successful shots for each Level 1 mission.

Video Game Systems

The Nintendo 3DS features a pedometer that rewards you with "steps" for taking it with you on walks (not to mention the ability to gain other peoples' Miis on Street Pass). You get "play coins" for walking enough (or just shaking the device up-and-down and side-to-side), which you can use in Mii games, but you can only get 10 a day, and can only store 300 at maximum. This was probably implemented so that people wouldn't spend all of their days farming for points, and possibly also suggesting that the owner of the system just take a nice, long easy walk, and not risk a wrist cramp.

PlayStation Home's Aurora space had a minigame where you could collect orbs to level up and get items. This sounds simple enough, and you could go back and retry as many times as you wanted to get better scores, however Aurora only registered your best try for that day. You had to come back tomorrow if you wanted more XP, so you could try to max out your XP for a day to your best ability, but it was more worthwhile to come back tomorrow.

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